Building history on hold

I am a design and architectural historian, and teach cultural history and design theory at various schools. As part of my research, I am particularly fond of postmodern architecture, which I am committed to communicating and recognising, especially in its form of everyday architecture on the margins – where, barely on the radar of history, it has often taken root, unnoticed by discussions about star architecture.

There were various big bangs that led me to this subject. Just over ten years ago, I was in London and Grace Jones looked at me from a poster on the Tube to promote a big exhibition on postmodernism at the V&A. Before that I had no real access to the period. It was an aesthetic that alienated me. I found the idea of doing a show about it appealing. I visited the exhibition and found it fascinating, but with the sense of ambivalence. I felt equally attracted and repelled. 

A second big bang was one of my favourite films by Brian De Palma from 1984, Body Double. In a key scene, there is a chase through a shopping centre in which the pursuer is, in turn, pursued as if in a puzzle. Brian De Palma staged this fantastically, setting it within 1980s Los Angeles architecture. So, we have postmodern architecture as a staging and, at the same time, De Palma is making a postmodern reference to Alfred Hitchcock. The scene is multi-layered, quite camp and has always fascinated me.

Then, I live in a postmodern building myself, which I didn't realise for a long time. The house has gables, turquoise-coloured shingles, maritime elements and a staircase that looks like Versailles. These were my three entrances into postmodernism.

Exactly. It was only later, when I was already one foot deeper into postmodernism, that I realised that certain aspects had already had an influence on me as a child. 

I was born in 1982 and somehow recognised this era as a child. There were two buildings, two images that left their mark on me. One was a bank building in the region where I grew up: the Kantonalbank in Baar, which was brand-new at the time. My mum took me there. What fascinated me about it as a child was that the cobblestones from the outside area extended into the interior. It ends in a fountain in the entrance hall, which is intended to be impressive and pompous. Now, postmodernism did not invent the blending of exterior and interior space. But later I realised that this is an encoding of a rural space that extends into the interior of the building. It is the staging of a village square. As a child I found this attractive, and later I found the language to describe it. 

The second picture was of a development in my home town of Zug, probably the largest postmodern development in German-speaking Switzerland: the Metalli shopping centre. There were escalators to the basement and between them an illusionistic mock-up of a staircase, probably made of Plexiglas, which was illuminated from the inside and programmed so that the illuminated steps moved back and forth, a bit like in a TV show. Through my research, I found out that the concept came from one of the most famous European lighting designers of the time.

In terms of postmodernism, it was these two buildings. My interest in architecture only intensified later, for example when travelling to South Africa. There I became interested in Afrikaans Brutalism. I read it as a kind of demonstration of power in the apartheid state and so social interests in architecture, questions of representation and power imbalances were added.

Yes, of course there are pictures that have more positive connotations than others. I had a classical phase in which I was interested in modernism and postwar modernism, with its sobriety and sometimes transparency, a formal reductionism. But I was always emotionally moved by other types of architecture.

I am not a classic academic. I have two hearts in my chest: design and architecture. I move between the two, and am interested in them because they are everyday phenomena. There is an official canon of what design and architecture should be and the actual experience in everyday life. There are often discrepancies in between and that's where it gets exciting. 

There is also the question of who writes the story. When I was deciding what to study, the options were film, media studies, design or architecture. It turned out to be design, probably by chance. But these interests are still united in me today. My biography is perhaps also postmodern, a bricolage.

We have to make a loop here. There is an aesthetic postmodernism; we think of decorative gables, garish colours, an almost cheap aesthetic. But there is also a view of postmodernism as an era. It is not easy to define it in terms of time, though. In English, there is the term “postmodernity”. It is probably a cultural condition that, since the late 1960s, has on the one hand taken its leave of modernism with elements of scepticism, and on the other hand has continued certain elements. Not least on a philosophical level, and this has had a lasting impact on the humanities, social sciences and the education system to this day.

Postmodernity has left its mark and is more than just a fashion. It has normalised itself over several decades and defined cultural strategies in popular culture that are now perceived as everyday life – for example in film. Then there is a narrower, visual or aesthetic level that can certainly be described as fashion – the gables and turrets, shop fronts or references to pop. What appeals to me about postmodernism is its symptomatic contradictoriness. It has a Janus face and formed in the late 1960s as a counterculture. 

In terms of design, it positioned itself clearly on the political left, sometimes even Marxist and anti-capitalist. Within a short space of time, however, postmodernism became the opposite of its original claims. It established itself and became a mere decoration of surfaces. This wave movement ran parallel to the triumph of neoliberalism on an ideological level. A reflected avant-garde became something aestheticising, a shell that was originally criticised. These contradictions can be clearly seen in architecture, but also in design. Alessi is a good example here.

There are two formulations that I have read up on. One is that postmodernism is the self-reflective sting of modernity, i.e. something that is inherent to modernity. Not in the sense of a renunciation, but that modernity is also inscribed with its own scepticism. The other is that postmodernism is the disruption of modernity. There are sparks and smoke, operations are disrupted, but they continue – in a different way. It would be an extension of modernism. The rejection of modernism took place mainly in an aesthetic sense. People turned against aesthetic functionalism. In architecture, this was called architectural functionalism.

Interesting question. I can't judge whether it's inner conflicts that are depicted. But postmodernism is certainly an embodiment of the discourses on high and low culture of the 1960s, which were translated into material culture. Complexity and contradiction, as with Robert Venturi. This contradictoriness can be overwhelming. But there is also a crude postmodernism that underwhelms. The combination of high and low culture, a backdrop-like façade, also has the claim of something cheap, not authentic, which can still be irritating today.

I am noticing a revival of interest in postmodernism among younger architects. But I wouldn't call it a revival yet. There are simply certain aspects that are being updated and flowing into our present. I recognise motifs and aesthetic strategies that go back to this period. It is not simply a revisiting, but much more selective. For example, semiotics is once again playing a more important role in architecture. Interest is also growing among the younger generation on the scientific side. You can watch this every day and it's great to see a new generation at work. The classic waiting period of 30 years to take a neutral look at an era and perhaps bring it to a comeback is slowly coming to an end.

These terms don't mean much to me, I don't work with them. I'm interested in everyday phenomena and everyday architecture. There are phenomena that only translate into the periphery a few years later, which makes them unfashionable. But I want to look at the architecture without judgement. When I look out of the window here, I don't see any great star architecture, but rather infrastructure, industry and functional architecture. Most residents are surrounded by this type of architecture, which has an influence on their everyday lives and how they perceive and organise their lives. I also like to approach anonymous architecture. Architecture by large construction companies, for example, which have become relevant simply because of their high output and have therefore had a significant influence on the face of Switzerland.

Every era has its own concept of fake. Every era produces its own fake and therefore every fake would also be contemporary. I don't see any discrepancy there. Even that which is perceived as inauthentic is based on its time and has its reasons for articulating itself in this way. This makes it contemporary. 

In the transition to contemporary architecture, postmodernism has normalised many things on a cultural level that are taken for granted today. In urban planning, for example, the response to the context, the consideration of the urban body as morphology. Perhaps this brings us to another definition of postmodernism: postmodernism as a method. An attitude that one adopts in the process and this definition has survived to this day. 

On an aesthetic level, the 1990s saw a departure from the almost baroque opulence of the 1980s and a renewed search for inspiration in classical modernism with lots of glass and transparency, which is interestingly disappearing again today. What I find fascinating about the 1990s is that the reduction and transparency were also a staging. They only represent the image of transparency; they can also be seen as neoliberal coding and are therefore simply marketing in the broadest sense. It is also exciting that the still young field of architectural psychology is investigating, among other things, why people might not want so much transparency. The ground floors with large windows, where people don't want others to be able to see into their living rooms. The well-being of the residents is therefore not necessarily what counts.

In the role of the teacher, there is often confusion in terms. Perhaps we should no longer speak of modern when we actually mean contemporary. After all, “modern” is always linked to “modernist”, which can be misleading because a historical component then resonates. It is interesting that, even today, modernism with a capital M still has a repulsive effect on many people. It is perceived as cold and unwelcoming, uncomfortable. There are many institutions, such as the Heimatschutz, that go to great lengths to present modernism as architecturally valuable. But I realise that a certain resistance remains; perhaps it remains too abstract. My gut feeling is that the communication of postmodernism will, in turn, trigger resistance in specialist circles, because postmodernism operates with populism and questions the formation of a canon. I think it will be less of a problem among the general public. Postmodernism can be read as cosy and fun.

I reach my limits when it comes to contemporary phenomena. But I think to myself, in 30 years' time, someone will come along and write a doctoral thesis about it. So I realise my own blind spot, but I try to work on it. This coldness is also a feeling that I encounter. Even if I feel alienated, I try not to think in an elitist way. Because stories and families are attached to all this architecture. Medium-sized orders for craftsmen and women, livelihoods. The majority live in this architecture and they all have the right to express themselves as they wish. To live the way they want. People often turn up their noses at everyday architecture. I can see the temptation to do so, but I want to look at it without judgement.

When it comes to postmodernism, it is interesting that there was and is an interest in the vernacular in the academic environment. But when it comes to the truly populist, people turn up their noses. Vernacular through the academic lens: that's fine. The truly vernacular, somewhere behind the smears: please don't. I find that exciting, but also a contradiction. Who decides which concept of vernacular applies?

What is important is the human scale, a connection to the human body and human emotion. That's what makes good architecture. Detached from styles that change.

I have ideas, romantic projections of how I would like to live. That's personal, so I can't name the place. Definitely in northern Europe, close to the North Sea. Type: a heated pile of stones. So archaic and very simple. I don't need a lot of space and like to have my freedom, little ballast. When I see sheep in the strong wind through the window, that's my idea of romance. I don't need good weather and I'm resistant.

My research work moves methodically between induction and deduction, reading off phenomena and bringing them together with prefabricated concepts and opinions. When I'm working on content, I log off and work in a completely analogue and isolated way. I go into mole mode. I love visiting archives. I could spend months there. I also like to go out and try to mediate, especially to people with different educational backgrounds, to build bridges. Even if we're talking more academically now, I think it's important to adapt the language – depending on the social context – and to show interest in these different backgrounds and stories.

Absolutely. I'm out and about in different social environments and that's important to me. Particularly at a time when social milieus are becoming less and less interdependent.

There is often a distortion in the teaching of design and cultural history. People say that cultural history, for example at design schools, is taught via the Bauhaus, then perhaps the postwar years, perhaps the upheavals of the 1960s and then that's it. But the 1960s were ages ago and there is a blind spot over the last 50 years. However, I notice a great deal of interest in the more recent past among students. I would also like to fill this gap. The second half of the 20th century should be emphasised, as should everyday observations. The current generation motivates me in my work. It's great to see when they discover paths that were unknown to them before.

The history of film is essential to the history of design and architecture. Michelangelo Antonioni's films, his way of staging spaces and buildings, provide a critique of modernism. At the same time, the architectural-historical discourse on a critical examination of modernism began. I think of Jeanne Moreau walking lost through the suburbs of Milan. Similar elements can be found later in Lucius Burckhardt's texts when he writes about wasteland. Film is a powerful medium for this. Or even when postmodern architecture is used as the backdrop for a postmodern narrative form, as we discussed at the beginning. This multi-layered approach is what makes film a unique medium.